Oil pollution kills Yemenis' health and oversight is absent

Oil slick at Calvali site in Al-Khashaa area of Hadramout Governorate (Transnational Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCCRB)

An oil slick at a Calvali site in Al-Khashaa area of Hadramout Governorate (Transnational Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (OCRP)

When oil rigs arrived in central Yemen three decades ago, Sheikh Salem Saeed bin Hawtli's tribe did not anticipate what would have happened. "Otherwise, we would have protected ourselves," he said in an interview with reporters, a tribal leader who lives in an agricultural area surrounded by oil wells.

In recent years, he recalls, he has seen foreign oil company workers dump barrels of what appear to be drilling waste into open sand barriers near where his tribe lives.

He recalled how birds used to come and drink water. But when it started to die, the company erected a fence around the sand pits, but that did little to prevent heavy rains from washing away the contents down the valley down to the Rseb area, where the Bin Hotli tribe lives in the heart of an oil-producing region.

Ben Hautli told the Transnational Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project (CCRP): "When torrential floods come we see blackness in the water that looks like oil.

Like other tribes living near Yemen's oil fields, the Hotli tribe has paid a heavy price while private and public oil extraction companies have made billions of dollars. Since the discovery of oil in Yemen in the eighties, attempts at accountability have stalled due to war and the fragmentation of political power.

Source : Al Jazeera